1. Technical Field
The invention is related to multi-party, computer network-based teleconferencing, and more particularly to a system and process for muting the audio transmission of a participant using a keyboard during such a conference to prevent the other participants from hearing keyboard typing noise.
2. Background Art
Meetings are an important part of everyday life for businesses large and small. However, it is often inconvenient for meeting participants to be at the same location at the same time. When these distributed team members are not co-located, meetings are typically conducted using computer network-based teleconferences. A variety of live teleconferencing systems are available commercially to facilitate these meetings.
During these teleconferences, the participants tend to multi-task. For example, a participant may check or edit email, surf the web, and so on, while “attending” the meeting. In some situations, this multi-tasking is actually more efficient than attending the meeting all the time. The participant will only need to be attentive to the meeting when the discussion is relevant to the participant.
However, it has been observed that this multi-tasking typically involves the use of a computer keyboard, and conversely when the participant is actively participating in the meeting he or she is typically talking and not typing on their keyboard.
This keyboard activity by a multi-tasking meeting participant presents a problem. When a participant is typing on a keyboard, the typing sound will be captured by either a microphone associated with the participant's computer (if the teleconference audio is being handled via VoIP), or the participant's telephone (if the teleconference audio is being captured via a conventional telephone, and if a) the telephone PBX exposes APIs to control the phone or there is a dangle between the PC and phone so that the two can communicate). This is socially unacceptable, because other meeting participants will know that the participant is multi-tasking and not paying attention to the meeting, and the typing noise may be distracting to the other participants.
One solution can be for the multi-tasking participant to manually turn the audio transmission on and off. However, this is an impractical imposition on the participant and would restrict the participant's ability to spontaneously move between typing on the keyboard and talking with the other participants. The present invention resolves this dilemma, while still allowing a meeting participant to type on a keyboard and spontaneously participate in the meeting without having to manually turn the audio transmission on and off.